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I knew AMD was going to deliver great performance with its next-gen Zen 3 processor architecture, but I wasn’t ready for it. The new Ryzen chips are fast and powerful for both content creation and productivity. It is not a surprise. The Zen 2 Ryzens are also perfect for these tasks. But it’s in gaming that the Ryzen 5000 series products are making the biggest gains – and that turns AMD processors into the obvious best choice on the desktop.
AMD is launching the 16-core Ryzen 9 5950X, 12-core Ryzen 9 5900X, 8-core Ryzen 7 5800X and the Ryzen 5 5600X with its new architecture. And all of these chips are making huge generational advancements in single-core performance. This is what keeps these processors ahead of Intel, which has long held the top spot in gaming thanks to its fast single-core performance.
I am arriving late into the Zen 3 review period due to a busy season that has caused me to spend a lot of time on Xbox Series X and other major launches. So for this story, I wanted to hang on to the game. Everyone already knows and expects Ryzen to outperform its Intel Core counterparts in most production tasks. But if you play 90% of the time on your PC, has Ryzen really pulled even… or even ahead? Well, the single-core Cinebench score suggests this is the case. All new Ryzens have outperformed the 10900K by a significant margin.
To determine this, I did two tests. I have run a number of CPU-intensive games at 1080p and medium settings. This will make the CPU the bottleneck and show the difference in performance between AMD and Intel offerings. In the other test, I went for something more realistic. Does it matter whether you are using Ryzen or Intel when playing 4K at ultra settings? Or is the GPU bottleneck overriding AMD’s performance improvements?
Let’s go.
Ryzen 5000 processors are generally faster under ideal conditions
At 1080p and lower graphics settings, you can often see the difference in power between the new Ryzens and the Intel Core i9-10900K.
In Avengers, every Ryzen matched or was a few frames faster than the competition Intel. AMD’s processors also have significantly better 95% lows, which suggests a smoother experience. As a reminder, 95% down and 99% down tell us that the game runs better than this framerate 95% or 99% of the time, respectively.
Avengers is interesting because it has Intel-branded processor functionality in its graphics settings, which I turned to maximum for these tests. And it looks like it hasn’t been a problem for AMD processors.
Teardown, a game about demolishing a voxel-based environment, also saw better performance on most AMD chips. The 5600X exceeded an average frame rate of 130.
Watch Dogs: Legion was relatively uniform. I agree with the consensus that this game likes a fast processor, but it clearly benefits from clock speeds instead of cores. My 5600X used this as well as the 16-core 5950X.
Finally, Microsoft’s Flight Simulator seems to like more cores – until you consider the overclocked 5600X, which ran at 5GHz on all cores. It was almost as fast as the 5950X.
Ryzen chips even help achieve more consistent 4K performance
The difference between 1080p and 2160p for benchmarking is that 2160p puts a lot more load on the GPU. Quad pixel rendering is the type of workload that usually causes congestion in the video card, which means your processor doesn’t matter as much.
And that was especially the case with AMD’s Ryzen 5000 product line. In Watch Dogs at 2160p, the 3500X, 3800X, 3900X, and 3950X are all basically tied to 44 frames per second. Avengers, Teardown, and Flight Sim in 4K all saw a similar tie.
The reality is that the differences between the 5600X and the 5950X don’t matter when the GPU is the bottleneck. And even in games that are notoriously hard on the processor, the GPU is more important in 4K.
Does that mean all of that benchmarking is unnecessary for anyone playing at 4K? Is Intel actually the same as AMD with ultra HD resolutions? Well, no – not if you factor in overclocking.
For these tests, I focused on overclocking the 5600X. And with a few tweaks, I was able to get significantly better performance from the AMD part. This led to higher frame rates in tests, even at 2160p.
Even in Flight Sim, which preferred the 10900K at stock speeds, the overclocked 3600X came out before that.
Now, this is not a one-on-one overclocking battle. You can also get better performance by adjusting the 10900K. It was just a quick way to show that at 4K you don’t necessarily need to spend more money than the $ 300 5600X. This will help in some cases, but it probably won’t stop you from playing. And considering how easy it is to overclock, it might even improve your 4K gaming.
Disassembly showed similar results.
The overclocked 5600X also offered the same benefits in Avengers.
Don’t hesitate to get the 5600X for gaming
My big takeaway here is that the new Ryzen processors are great, especially the 5600X. It’s a slam dunk of a gaming processor. And if you gamble on your PC most of the time and do your taxes or occasionally browse the web, you don’t need more than that. Spend $ 300 on that chip, then put the rest of your budget into a GPU.
If you want to play and stream live from a PC, or want to edit video or create 3D models, start using the 8-core 5800X or the 12-core 5900X. Even the 5950X, which costs $ 800, seems like a good deal considering it could give you similar results to a two-PC streaming setup with one machine.
As for Intel, it is simply no longer in the conversation. It will continue to fight, but I won’t be recommending their processors to anyone anytime soon. It’s not even like the 10900K or 10600K is bad. They are actually very good game processors. It’s just that the equivalent Ryzens are better in every way.
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